On March 1st and 2nd, iContact welcomed four area non-profits to iBootCamp, an intensive two-day session where our skilled professionals teamed up to solve critical technology and marketing issues for area non-profits.

Said Jon Cage, Manager of Product Development:

“Our software engineers, usability experts, and interface designers create software used by tens of thousands of clients on a daily basis. That level of technical expertise is usually beyond the financial reach of non-profit organizations. To me, the value of iBootCamp was enabling iContact’s engineers and designers to give back to the community by giving local non-profits technical expertise that they normally could not access.”

The non-profits who joined us were Durham Literacy Center, Conservators’ Center, Dress for Success, and the Center for Child and Family Health.

The Durham Literacy Center (DLC) had an outdated Google website that did not do justice to the sophistication and quality of their programming. Thanks to the iContact team that worked alongside DLC during iBootCamp, the organization now has an attractive new WordPress site that will serve its low-literacy population, tutors, and donors.

Old site:

New site:

The Conservators’ Center already had a beautifully designed site, but it did not render properly on mobile devices. Our iContact team did extensive debugging to fix the site, and now their looks great on mobile devices. Try it out on your device!

Our work with Dress for Success (DFS) and the Center for Child and Family Health was more focused on marketing strategy. We helped DFS write a communications survey to understand how their various constituencies could be best communicated with, trained a DFS representative on using Facebook events, and set up a free text messaging tool called Celly for DFS to communicate last-minute information. And for the Center for Child and Family Health, we offered strategy advice on email and social media marketing for their upcoming fundraisers.

Recommendations for non-profits:

If you are facing technology challenges, reach out to area tech/marketing-savvy companies to request volunteer assistance. While financial support is critical and could help you buy a solution, some companies may be more inclined to offer volunteer assistance.

When thinking about your technology needs, make sure you fully understand the problem you face before determining a solution.